A tour through the Vancouver music scene.

Compared to spending a Friday night circling the streets
of downtown Portland looking for a free parking spot, venturing 15
minutes north on I-5 and slipping into Vancouver’s city center at night
feels like entering an alternate universe. The sidewalks are almost
completely empty, save for a few souls braving the downpour to hit up
one of the bars or restaurants lining Main Street. And finding a parking
spot took all of two minutes after exiting the highway.

More than that, it’s
the scene I tumbled into at Pop Culture, one of the few spots downtown
that books live music, that makes Vancouver truly seem like another
world. The small, all-ages venue and restaurant has all the aesthetic
charm of a church rec room: It’s a square performance space with scuffed
concrete floors and plastic lawn chairs lined up in front of a
foot-high stage covered by a Persian rug.

And
yet, every one of those lawn chairs was filled with a fresh-faced,
fashionable youngster quaffing a bottle of soda after having plunked
down $8—$7 if you wore a hat—to watch a bill of five Vancouver bands.
The lineup includes Jeff Buckley-styled singer-songwriter Bev Lapuz and
metal-funk quartet Kings and Vagabonds, a group featuring a
wheelchair-bound virtuoso bass player and a singer with long, stringy
black hair and a penchant for headbanging.

“It’s usually a lot
busier than this,” says Joey LeBard, Pop Culture’s owner. “The rain must
be slowing people down. We usually get a lot of kids that like to
bounce between here and the parking lot down the street.”

As many people were
quick to point out to me, not all shows in Vancouver look like this. In
fact, on that same Friday night, just down the street at the more
traditional Brickhouse Bar & Grill, a sedate bunch of middle-aged
patrons greeted the prog-y jams of local quartet Guillotine Necktie with
the polite applause of indifference.

Regardless, the
musicians and promoters in Vancouver are adamant the city’s music scene
is a growing, thriving entity—even if Portlanders rarely take notice.

“I don’t know why
we’re kind of like Portland’s dirty stepsister,” says Travis Zimmerly,
one-half of booking and promotion crew Vanclocal360. “A lot of the same
bands from here are playing in Portland, and some people from there are
fans, but we can’t get them to come to a show over here.”

The roster of bands
Zimmerly lists on his company’s Facebook page offers some insight into
that disconnect: The majority of them are heavy-metal and hard-rock
bands or hip-hop acts, genres that boast few midlevel success stories.
Bands dabbling in more mainstream genres have managed to make inroads
outside Vancouver. One local sensation, ’90s-inspired alt-rockers I
Digress, has two shows booked in Hawaii, including an opening slot for
Everclear. Groups like reggae popsters the Sindicate, proto-grunge trio A
Killing Dove and the punk-tinged Atlas and the Astronaut have also
become mainstays on the Portland show calendar.

What Vancouver
ultimately needs is a figure to help foment a combination of civic pride
and creativity that helped put Olympia firmly on the cultural map. The
person who comes closest to filling that role in Vancouver is Zimmerly. A
tireless music junkie, Zimmerly has, for the past three years, put a
great deal of money and energy into Local Fest, an annual, all-day
concert held on his in-laws’ 20-acre spread in nearby Battle Ground.
“The best part was, all the other musicians would get right up by the
stage and support the other bands, no matter who they were,” Zimmerly
says.

Beyond wowing their
local fans and peers, the Vancouver musicians I spoke to all
acknowledged that one of the biggest steps toward getting their music
and city the attention they deserve is nudging them into the jaded view
of the gatekeepers and tastemakers in Portland.

“You have to
establish that audience,” says Atlas and the Astronaut singer Beau
Rosser. “Build a culture around your band so it doesn’t matter where you
play, people will be there. And most of all, don’t be afraid to say
you’re from Vancouver.”

<a href="http://atlasandtheastronaut.bandcamp.com/album/atlas-and-the-astronaut">Atlas and the Astronaut by Atlas and the Astronaut</a>